You cannot begin to imagine in how many ways the world is the opposite of what you have been taught to believe.

You see the guy who sells drugs to willing customers so he can feed his family as the scum of the earth, while you see the hypocrite who gives away stolen money in the name of government as a saint. You see the guy who tries to avoid being robbed by the federal thugs as a crook and a tax cheat, but see as virtuous the politician who gives away the same stolen loot to people to whom it does not belong.

You see the cop as a good guy when he drags a man away from his friends and family and throws him in prison for ten years for smoking a leaf, and you see anyone who defends himself from such barbaric fascism as the lowest form of life—a cop-killer. In reality, most drug dealers are more virtuous than any government social worker, and prostitutes have far less to be ashamed of than political whores, because they trade only with what is rightfully theirs, and only with those who want to trade with them. The upstanding, church-going, law-abiding, tax-paying citizen who votes Democrat or Republican is far more despicable, and a bigger threat to humanity, than the most promiscuous, lazy, drug-snorting hippie. Why? Because the hippie is willing to let others be free, and the voter is not. The damage done to society by bad habits and loose morality is nothing compared to the damage done to society by the self-righteous violence committed in the name of the state.

You imagine yourselves to be charitable and tolerant, when you are nothing of the sort. Even the Nazis had table manners and proper etiquette when they weren’t killing people. You think you’re good people because you say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’? You think sitting in that big building on Sunday makes you noble and righteous? The difference between you and a common thief is that the thief has the honesty to commit the crime himself, while you whine for government to do your stealing for you. The difference between you and the street thug is that the thug is open about the violence he commits, while you let others forcibly control your neighbors on your behalf. You advocate theft, harassment, assault, and even murder, but accept no responsibility for doing so.

You old folks want the government to steal from your kids so you can get your monthly check. You parents want all your neighbors to be robbed to pay for your kids’schooling. You all vote for whichever crook promises to steal money from other people to pay for what you want. You demand that those people who engage in behaviors you don’t approve of be dragged off and locked up, but feel no guilt for the countless lives your whims have destroyed. You even call the government thugs your ‘representatives,’ and yet you never take responsibility for the evil they commit. You proudly support the troops as they kill whomever the liars in D.C. tell them to kill, and you feel good about it.

You call yourselves Christians, or Jews, or claim to follow some other religion, but the truth is, what you call your religion is empty window-dressing. What you truly worship, the god you really bow to, what you really believe in, is the state. ‘Thou shalt not steal.’‘Thou shalt not murder.’ Unless you can do it by way of government. Then it’s just fine, isn’t it? If you call it ‘taxation’ and ‘war,’it stops being a sin, right? After all, it was only your god that said you shouldn’t steal and murder, but the state said it was okay. It’s pretty obvious which one outranks the other in your minds. Despite all the churches, synagogues, and mosques we see around us, this nation has one god, and only one god, and that god is called ‘government’.

Jesus taught nonviolence, and told you to love your neighbor, but the state encourages you to vote for people who will use the violence of government to butt into every aspect of everyone else’s life. Which do you believe? To those about to stone a woman who had committed adultery, Jesus said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ But the state says it’s perfectly fine to lock someone up if they do something you find distasteful, such as prostitution. Which do you believe? The Christian God says, ‘Thou shalt not covet.’But coveting is the lifeblood of the beast that is the state. You are taught to resent, despise, and hate anyone who has anything you don’t have. You clamor for the state to tear other people down, steal their property, and give it to you. And you call that ‘fairness.’ The Bible calls it ‘coveting’ and ‘stealing’.

You are not Christians. You are not Jews. You are not Muslims. And you certainly aren’t atheists. You all have the same god, and its name is ‘government.’ You’re all members of the most evil, insane, destructive cult in history. If there ever was a devil, the state is it. And you worship it with all your heart and soul. You pray to it to solve every problem, to satisfy all your needs, to smite your enemies and to shower its blessings upon you. You worship what Nietzsche called ‘the coldest of all cold monsters’ and you hate those of us who don’t. To you, the greatest sin is disobeying your god—‘breaking the law,’ you call it—as if anyone could possibly have any moral obligation to obey the arbitrary commands and demands of the corrupt, lying, delusional megalomaniacs who infest this despicable town.

Even your ministers, priests and rabbis, more often than not, are traitors to their own religions, teaching that the commands of human ‘authority’ should supersede adherence to the laws of the gods they say they believe in. Several years ago, I heard one pompous evangelical jackass in particular pontificating on the radio that anyone who disobeys the civil authority, be it a king or any other government, is engaging in rebellion against God—those were the exact words he used. What if the government is doing something wrong? Well, this salesman for Satan opined, that is the business of those in government, and you are still obligated to obey. Everywhere you turn, be it the state or the church, the media or the schools, you are taught one thing above all else: the virtue of subjugating yourselves to mortals who claim to have the right to rule you.

It is sickening, the reverence with which you speak of the liars and thieves whose feet are so firmly planted on your necks. You call the congressmen and the judges ‘honorable,’ and you swoon at the magnificence of the grandiose halls they inhabit, like this one, the temples they built to celebrate the domination of mankind. You feel pride at being able to say you once shook a senator’s hand, or saw the President in person. Ah, yes, the grand deity himself, His Royal Highness, the President of the United States of America. You speak the title as if you’re referring to God Almighty. The vocabulary has changed a bit, but your mindset is no different from that of the groveling peasants of old who bowed low, faces in the dirt, with a feeling of unworthiness and humility, when in the presence of whatever narcissist had declared himself to be their rightful lord and master. The truth of the matter, back then and today, is that these parasites who call themselves ‘leaders’ are not superior beings, they are not great men and women, they are not honorable, they’re not even average.

The people who earn an honest living, from sophisticated millionaire entrepreneurs to illiterate day laborers doing the most menial tasks you can imagine, those people deserve your respect. Those people you should treat with courtesy and civility. But the frauds who claim the right to rule you, and demand your subservience and obedience, they deserve only your scorn and contempt. Those who seek so-called high office are the lowest of the low. They may dress better, have larger vocabularies, and do a better job of planning out and executing their schemes, but they are no better than pickpockets, muggers and carjackers. In fact, they are worse, because they don’t want to rob you of just your possessions; they want to rob you of your very humanity, deprive you of your free will, by slowly leaching away your ability to think, to judge, to act, reducing you to slaves in both body and mind.

And still you persist in calling them ‘leaders.’Leaders? Where is it that you think you’re going, exactly, that would require you to have a leader? If you just live your own life and mind your own damn business, exercising your own talents, pursuing your own dreams, striving to be what you believe you should be, what possible use would you have for a leader? Do you ever actually think about the words that you hear, the words that you repeat? You parrot oxymoronic terms such as ‘the leader of the free world.’ Even pretending for a moment that there is some huge journey or some giant battle that everyone in the entire nation is undertaking together that would require a leader, why would you ever think, even for a moment, that the crooks that infest this town are the sort of people you should listen to, or emulate, or follow anywhere?

Somewhere inside your mostly dormant brains, you know full well that politicians are all corrupt liars and thieves, opportunistic con men, exploiters and fear-mongers. You know all this, and yet you still speak as if you are the ones who are the stupid, vicious animals, while the politicians are the great, wise role models, teachers, and leaders, without whom civilization could not exist.

You think these crooks are the ones who make civilization possible? What belief could be more absurd? Yet when they do their pseudo-religious rituals, deciding how to control you this week, you still call it ‘law,’ and continue to treat their arbitrary demands as if they were moral decrees from the gods, that no decent person would ever consider disobeying.

You have become so thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult of state-worship that you are truly shocked when the occasional sane person states the bleeding obvious: the mere fact that the political crooks wrote something down and declared their threats to be ‘law’ does not mean that any human being anywhere has the slightest moral obligation to obey. Every moment of every day, in every location and every situation, you have a moral obligation to do what you deem to be right, not what some delusional bloated windbag says is ‘legal.’ And that requires you to first determine right and wrong for yourself—a responsibility you spend much time and effort trying to dodge.

You proclaim how proud you are to be ‘law-abiding citizens,’ and express utter contempt for anyone who considers himself above your so-called ‘laws,’ laws that are nothing more than the selfish whims of tyrants and thieves. The word ‘crime’ once meant an act harmful to another person. Now it means disobedience to any one of the myriad of arbitrary commands coming from a parasitical criminal class. To you, the term ‘crime’ is nearly synonymous with the word ‘sin,’ implying that the ones whose commands are being disobeyed must be something akin to gods, when in truth they are more akin to leeches. The very phrase, ‘taking the law into your own hands,’ perfectly expresses what a sacrilege it is, in your eyes, for a mere human being to take upon himself the responsibility to judge right from wrong, and to act accordingly, instead of doing what you do: unthinkingly obeying whatever capricious commands this cesspool of maggots spews forth.

You glorify this criminal class as ‘lawmakers’ and believe that no one is lower than a ‘lawbreaker’—someone who would dare disobey the politicians. Likewise, you speak with pious reverence of ‘law enforcers’—those who forcibly impose the politicians’ every whim upon the rest of us. When the state uses violence, you imagine it to be inherently righteous and just. And if anyone resists, they are, in your eyes, contemptible lowlifes—lawless, terrorist criminals. Like the lawless, terrorist criminals who helped slaves escape the plantations; like the lawless, terrorist criminals who helped Jews escape the killing machine of the Third Reich; like the lawless, terrorist criminals who were crushed to death under the tanks of the Red Chinese government in Tiananmen Square; like all the lawless, terrorist criminals in history who had the courage to disobey the never-ending stream of tyrants and oppressors who have called their violence ‘authority’ and ‘law.’ And that includes the lawless, terrorist criminals who founded this country.

Everything you think you know is upside-down, backwards, and inside-out. But what has to take the cake—the height of your insanity—is the fact that you view as violent terrorists the only people on the planet who oppose the initiation of violence against their fellow men: anarchists, voluntaryists, and libertarians. We use violence only to defend ourselves against someone who initiates violence against us. We use it for nothing else. Meanwhile, your belief system is completely schizophrenic and self-contradictory. On the one hand, you teach the young slaves that violence is never the answer, yet out of the other side of your mouths, you advocate that everyone and everything, everywhere and at all times, be controlled, monitored, taxed, and regulated through the force of government. In short, you are teaching your children that the masters may use violence whenever they please, but the slave should never resist. You indoctrinate your children into a life of unthinking, helpless subservience. You are putting the chains around their little necks and fastening the locks tight. And worst of all, you feel good about it.

Out of one side of your mouths, you condemn the evils of fascism and socialism, and lament the injustices of the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, while out of the other side of your mouths you preach exactly what they did: the worship of the collective, the subjugation of every individual to that evil insanity that wears the deceptive label, ‘the common good.’ You babble on and on about diversity and open-mindedness, and then beg your masters to regulate and control every aspect of everyone’s lives, creating a giant herd of unthinking, conformist drones. You wear different clothes and have different hairstyles, and you think that makes you different, yet all your minds are enslaved to the same club of masters and controllers. You think what they tell you to think, and do what they tell you to do, while imagining yourselves to be progressive, thinking, and enlightened.

From your position of relative comfort and safety, you now condemn the evils of other lands and other times while turning a blind eye to the injustices happening right in front of you. You tell yourself that, had you lived in those other places in those other times, you would have been among those who stood up against oppression and defended the downtrodden. But that is a lie. You would have been right there with the rest of the flock of well- trained sheep, loudly demanding that the slaves be beaten, that the witches be burned, that the nonconformists and rebels be destroyed. How do I know this? Because that is exactly what you are doing today.

Today’s injustices and oppressions are fashionable and popular, and those who resist them, you tell yourselves, are just malcontents and freaks, people whose rights don’t matter, people who deserve to be crushed under the boot of authority. Isn’t that right? You bunch of spineless, unthinking hypocrites. Look in the mirror, take a good look at what you imagine to be righteous and kind. You are the Devil’s plaything. The crowds of thousands wildly applauding the speeches of Adolf Hitler? That was you. The mob demanding that Jesus Christ be nailed to the cross? That was you. The white invaders who celebrated the wholesale slaughter of those godless redskins? That was you. The throngs filling the Colosseum, applauding as the Christians were fed to the lions? That was you. Throughout history, the perpetual suffering and injustice, occurring on an incomprehensible scale—it was all because of people just like you: the well-trained, thoroughly indoctrinated conformists, the people who do as they’re told, who proudly bow to their masters, who follow the crowd, believing what everyone else believes and thinking whatever authority tells them to think. That is you.

And your ignorance is not because the truth is not available to you. There have been radicals preaching it for thousands of years. No, you are ignorant because you shun the truth with all your heart and soul. You close your eyes and run away when a hint of reality lands in front of you. You condemn as extremists and fringe kooks those who try to show you the chains you wear, because you don’t want to be free; you don’t even want to be human. Responsibility and reality scare the hell out of you, so you cling tightly to your own enslavement and lash out at any who seek to free you from it. When someone opens the door to your cage, you cower back in the corner and yell, ‘Close it, close it!’

Well, some of us are finished with trying to save you. We’ve wasted enough effort trying to convince you that you should be free. All you ever do is spout back what your masters have taught you: that being free only leads to chaos and destruction, while being obedient and subservient leads to peace and prosperity. There are none so blind as those who will not see. And you, you nation of sheep, would rather die than see the truth.

Grants speech from Larken Roses’ book The Iron Web. To find out more about Larken Rose visit www.larkenrose.com